APPLICATIONS ENGINEER
As an Applications Engineer, I am in charge of the Tacton Design Automation Project, IIC (India Innovation Center) Project, and continuous improvement efforts throughout the organization.
The Tacton Design Automation project is novel to the Inpro/Seal's conventional design process and is conservatively projected to save 50% on design time for standard parts and 67% on miscellaneous (one-off) parts. The first step for this project was facilitating many meetings internally and externally to establish the project scope, requirements, and budget. Once that was completed, I reviewed the service provider's proposal and statement of work for the project which was then used to create my own proposal for the Director of Engineering at Dover Precision Components. Once approved, I did some ROI calculations (ROI in less than 9 months) and presented a formal expense review to get that approved. The next step will be working with the service provider to automate the design of a couple of standard product lines. The final step will be attending training sessions, learning, and then training my team on how to automate the rest of our standard product lines ourselves.
The IIC (India Innovation Center) project is another novel introduction to Inpro/Seal's design process. The goal of this project is to train new engineers (currently 2) on this team to off-load some of the standard design work so experienced staff can have more time to work on more complex tasks and new product development. I am currently developing SOW documents, training videos, and conducting online training sessions to make this transition of workflow as smooth as possible.
MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEER
As a Mechanical Design Engineer at Inpro/Seal, I design product seals for industrial process equipment and bearing isolators for motors, turbines, gearboxes, and pumps. The primary function of bearing isolators is to retain lubricant and prevent contaminants from entering the bearing housing. Similarly, the primary function of product seals is to prevent the product from leaking and contaminant from entering the product.
At work, tasks are assigned a level of complexity (L1, L2, L3, L4) and type such as (Have the order, Quote – No Typical, Quote – Need Typical, Consultation/Other). Our engineering team is split into territories so I’d mostly take care of our customers in Canada and Mexico.
Most of the time, the first step to any project is receiving a customer RFQ (Request for Quote) where all the necessary application details are filled out. In the case there are any missing details or the design will be a specialty (one-off) part, I will work with inside and outside sales to establish a line of communication with the customer. The next step would be creating the 3D modeling using Solidworks where manufacturability constraints such as tooling and machinability are taken into account. For standard parts, the next steps would be drafting the manufacturing prints to ISO 9001:2015 standards, creating the BOM (Bill of Materials) on our manufacturing ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) software, and approving the prints to be sent to programming. However, with more complex specialty parts, it’s not always this simple. Once the 3D modeling is complete, I send a Typical Drawing to the customer for approval. Once this is approved, I can go on to draft the manufacturing prints, create the BOM, and approve these prints for programming. More recently, amidst the pandemic and global supply chain disruptions, I have also had to design bearing isolators to accommodate material shortages such as O-rings that can lead to longer lead times.
CONSULTATIONS
Consultations can range from being as simple as providing a dimension to as complex as conducting a root cause analysis for a seal failure. For most root causes analysis, I would start off by first visually inspecting the seal and recording any oddities. Then, I would disassemble the seal to inspect the internals and measure critical dimensions to compare them with the manufacturing print. Most of the time, this will allow me to determine the root cause for the seal failure and recommend action steps to the customer.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
When designing bearing isolators, we often start with a template of a standard design or a similar reference part that was designed in the past. However, some of the standard templates have not been updated in years and in many cases, there are not any standard templates for designs we make fairly often which can lead to time consuming edits that could have been avoided. For this reason, I have been creating new and updating existing templates to improve engineering efficiency from receiving the order to finishing the manufacturing print.